THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT By M. C. Bradbrook
Current Literature
Of " Sir Walter Rawley's School of Atheism . . . wherein both Moyses and our Saviour, the Old and New Testament are jested at, and the schollers taught to spell God backwards," little has hitherto been known. Some years ago the Cambridge editors of Shakespeare discovered that not only was much of Love's Labour's Lost, with its courtly academy, a satire of what Shakespeare called The School of Night, but that its chief figure of fun, Don Armado, the "fantastical _Spaniard," was intended as a direct caricature of Ralegly himself. • Marlowe's connexion with the "'School '? was already inferred from Richard.Chomley's evidence before the Privy Council in 1593, when he said that : "Chic Marlowe is able to show more -sound- reasons for Atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity, and that Marlowe told him that he bath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Ralegh." This
atheism," of course, was much nearer Deism, or free-thought, of the kind prevalent in Europe at the time and later developed by Bacon into a more scientific empiricism. Miss Bradbrook's contribution (Cambridge University Press, 6s.) has been to trace the influence of the School of Night, which numbered among its members the poets Chapman, Matthew Royden and William Warner, Thomas Harriot. the mathematician, and the _earls of Northumberland,. and Derby, upon such works as Tantburlaine and Dr. Faustus. Following up a , suggestion of Miss Ellis-Fermor, in her Christopher Marlowe, Miss Bradbrook has also shown the essential similarity of thought between the rather confused ideology of 'Marlowe's early plays and the opinions of Ralegh, as found in such writings as The Soul and The Sceptic. Her book also includes a chapter on Ralegh's poetry. Too little attention has hitherto been given to this side of Ralegh's work and its development of the courtly tradition
of. Surrey and Wyatt, and Miss -Bradbrook's careful analysis of these poems is a valuable chapter in a book which is throughout stimulating and delightful.
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